The US metaphor isn’t far from the truth… Donald Trump condemned what he called “so-called judges” while appointing his own cronies, even inside the SCOTUS
Summary: EPO President (auctioned role) António Campinos doesn’t care what judges say, especially judges that he does not control
Summary: “ILOAT sees more violations of staff rights at European Patent Office,” says this new blog post, but do not expect any so-called ‘journalists’ to even mention it (the publishers are bribed and complicit)
THE management of the EPO is just as corrupt as it was 5 years ago and 10 years ago. Nothing has improved at all, except maybe the lack of media participation. There’s hardly any journalism anymore and EPO autocrats exploit this to flood the Web with paid-for puff pieces, relaying lies and glorification of illegal agenda.
“So this decision was published less than 4 days ago. Let’s see if the media reactions; don’t hold your breath…”Having said that, an anonymous blogger has just published the above. “Translations are available in German, French and Dutch,” SUEPO added today (minutes ago). To quote: “The EPO has violated the right of free association by imposing restrictions on staff’s choice of members for the Appeals Committee and other statutory bodies of the EPO. The Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organisation ruled this in a case which was published on 6 July 2022. In another case it judged that restrictions put on the use of the internal mail system in 2013 were unlawful and must be quashed. [...] In its decision of 6 July 2022, the tribunal judged decision CA/D 2/14 violated the right of staff to freely associate.”
So this decision was published less than 4 days ago. Let’s see if the media reactions; don’t hold your breath…
The EPO doesn’t matter anyway… it’s ‘only’ Europe’s second-largest institution, serving the interests of the same corporations which own much of what’s left of the media. █
Some “patrons” do not age well…
Summary: As recently noted here, bagging a lot of money from large corporations (not individual members) is a risky move; it’s what killed the OSI and made the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation obsolete (habitual lobby against the interests of Linux)
WHILE looking back at the history of the FSF's Web site I stumbled upon lots of interesting things, such as “bkuhn” (later SFC) and “greve” (FSFE founder) editing the FSF’s front page/homepage more than two decades ago; prior to that it was “rms”.
The FSF’s corporate sponsorship program started more than a decade and a half ago. In retrospect, this page from 2006 is interesting (July 15th, 2006; months before the Novell/Microsoft deal or when they were already negotiating their patent collusion). From what we can gather, that was about a year after the programme had started. Up until then the FSF relied on awards (grants) received by the founder and then members. Wikipedia notes that: “On November 25, 2002, the FSF launched the FSF Associate Membership program for individuals.”
Novell was an FSF sponsor (“patron”) the year it was flirting with Microsoft and scheming to undermine the GPLv2 using software patents. Novell would later pay the EFF for “patent busting” to in a failed bid to appease critics of the “deal” (collusion). What’s interesting though is that Novell gave money to the FSF and yet the FSF immediately spoke out against Novell’s “deal”; but such conflicts of interest did occasionally cause trouble and, charting Linux Foundation territories/waters, this can lead to trouble. █
It looked similar in 2001 and 2002. Skipping two years.
Summary: Aged 30, Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT (where he continued to live until 1998 when he was still the editor of the FSF’s Web site); the above helps show the dynamics of the organisation throughout the years
Microsoft’s very own ‘Hans Reiser moment’
When the person at the top of Copilot does these sorts of things, the ethical and legal abuses of Copilot suddenly seem like the “lesser” issues
Summary: As noted here before, Microsoft and GitHub have a serious misogyny and sexism problem (like physical assault on women) and it goes all the way to the top; we shall resume this series some time in the future (it’s unclear if Microsoft still pays him $12,000 per month)
We’re made it!
Summary: Techrights has secured its presence and “sustainability” online; now, with 34,000 blog posts (over 2,000 per year), we’re trying to better organise the material for faster delivery
I didn’t think we’d get here, but here we are. The “over 9,000″ jokes seem like only yesterday (I can still recall the IRC conversation about exceeding 9,000 blog posts) and since then, one grand (1,000) at the time, we kept climbing higher.
We have a large trove of material left to publish, but we’re pacing it down somewhat so as to not overwhelm readers. It’s strategic, too.
This past week we worked on developing a new CMS (a very simple one, but also very lightweight). We can’t wait to take it live. It’s probably safe to say that Techrights will still be around a decade from now; if the World Wide Web perishes, we still have IRC, IPFS, Gemini, and daily plain-text bulletins that can be dispatched in all sorts of ways. In a way, we’ve already secured our future.
This post will be the 33,999th one. Next up is the “real” 34k. █
When it comes to benchmarks, most computer users are probably interested in performance comparisons of hardware and software running on the same operating system. Is this or that graphics card better for a gaming PC? Which Android device offers the better performance?
It’s been nine months since Windows 11 was publicly released back in October. As such, and as we are closer to the general availability (GA) of succeeding version 22H2, it is natural to wonder how the performance of Windows 11 has evolved during this time. Recently, Puget Systems tested the OS against Windows 10 and found that Windows 11 had improved significantly since last time. And earlier today, fellow outlet Phoronix pit Windows 11 against Ubuntu and Clear Linux to see how the Microsoft OS fares.
Learn the command to reset the changes made to GNOME Desktop on Linux systems such as Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish.
Linux comes with extreme possibilities to customize the Desktop GUI interface such as Gnome. However, if you are a beginner and made some changes that don’t offer the desired effect and have unpleasant residuals then there is a way to reset it. A command to get back the default settings of Gnome UI or factory settings
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nmap on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Nmap a.k.a Network Mapper is a command-line network scanning utility for Linux and other operating systems. It is also used for network inventory services, managing service upgrades, and monitoring hosts’ downtime. While Nmap is a potent tool, it is essential to note that it can be misused. In the hands of a skilled attacker, Nmap can be used to launch attacks against systems or to gather sensitive information about a network.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Nmap network scanning tool on a Fedora 36.
If you’ve recently stepped into the Linux world, you may have heard the term GNOME thrown around a lot. But what exactly is it? In this article, we’ll take a look at this popular desktop environment and what it offers.
Learn the simple steps to upgrade Linux Mint Debian Edition – LMDE 4 to LDME 5 using the GUI interface of the OS even beginners can do it.
To provide an alternative to Ubuntu but based on Debian, Linux Mint offers their Debian Edtion known as LMDE. The key idea behind providing a Debian edition of Mint developers is to offer the same user experience even if someday Ubuntu will not be there anymore for Desktops. This also reduces the dependencies of the Linux Mint team on Ubuntu.
Well, for those who are currently using the LDME 4 version and want to upgrade their system to its latest version but without reinstalling the OS, this tutorial is for them.
Metasploit is an open-source project that provides, among other things, the Metasploit framework. It includes a collection of exploits that can be used to test the security of computer systems. Many times apart from the developers or testers it also is used by hackers.
If we talk through the lawful angle, the framework provided by the Metasploit Open Source project is mainly used to test computer systems for security gaps. It offers a bundle of exploit tools to carry out a wide variety of security and penetration tests that can be carried out on distributed target systems. Even software developers can use it to test their software to find out potential loopholes.
Metasploit Framework developers used Ruby language to create it, and it is available to install on various operating systems. It includes all major Linux and Unix versions, macOS and Windows. Generally, the users need to install it manually, however, penetration Linux distributions such as Kali out of the box offers Metasploit.
How many Linux machines are you managing on your network or your cloud-hosted platform? These days, that number is probably growing fairly quickly, especially given how much businesses not only depend on Linux for regular services, but containerized and cloud-native deployments.
So, yeah, those Linux machines are probably growing exponentially by the week or month. That means you have more and more machines to manage, which can be rather time-consuming. Given how busy your day already is, you don’t need to have to log into every single machine and run commands manually.
With that in mind, what do you do? One solution is to turn to a centralized configuration management tool, such as Red Hat‘s Ansible. One of the best things about Ansible, is that is makes use of SSH and YAML files to handle the heavy lifting of remote work. That means you don’t have to bother with installing agents on the servers you need to manage because it’s all handled via the controller.
I’m going to walk you through the installation and configuration of Ansible on Ubuntu Server and then show you how to use the platform to run your first Ansible playbook.
Security and being conscious about your actions and decisions that could hamper or strengthen your Linux environment to be secure, is becoming more and more important. When you download a Linux ISO image file to create a bootable live environment to test a Linux distribution and eventually to install it on your production machine, it is important to be sure about its authenticity and integrity. In this article, as part of my Zorin OS tutorial series, I want to explain how to verify your Zorin OS ISO image file to start your secure Linux journey.
Blender is the free and open-source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline — modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and video editing. Blender is a public project made by hundreds of people worldwide by studios and individual artists, professionals and hobbyists, scientists, students, VFX experts, animators, game artists, modders, and more. As an open-source project with a community that spans the globe, Blender is truly unique.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Blender on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using three different methods using the command line terminal along.
It may seem a minor issue today, but Linux gaming security will become a bigger deal in the future

KDE Frameworks 5.96 doesn’t look as big as the previous release, but it adds some interesting changes that I believe you’ll find useful if you use the KDE Plasma desktop environment. For example, it updates the “Battery and Brightness” widget to also display battery levels for connected wireless touchpads.
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.96.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
This week I mainly worked on Licentia, a development companion app to help you choose a license for your project.

Coming three and a half months after Debian GNU/Linux 11.3, the Debian GNU/Linux 11.4 release is here to provide the Debian GNU/Linux community with up-to-date installation and live mediums for those who want to deploy the “Bullseye” operating system series on new computers.Debian GNU/Linux 11.4 comes with all the latest security updates and miscellaneous bug fixes that have been released from late March 2022 until today for existing users through the main software repositories. In numbers, it includes a total of 81 miscellaneous bug fixes and 79 security updates.
Debian 11.4 is the fourth point release in the Bullseye series, initially released in August 2021. This release comes just over three months after the previous 11.3 release, which may surprise users who have gotten accustomed to periods longer between releases.
This newest release consists primarily of bug fixes and security patches. This is because Debian’s minor releases are focused solely on system stability, which is a distribution trademark, rather than adding new features.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 11 (codename bullseye). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 11 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old bullseye media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
A lower profile release today: Sledge working in the background as affected by COVID. RattusRattus and Isy doing sterling service on the other side of Cambridge, /me over here.
Testing on the standard install media is pretty much done: Isy, Andy and Sledge have moved on to testing the live images.
Stupidly hot for UK – it’s 28 degrees indoors with windows open.
All good so far
A detailed review of DAT Linux – a Linux operating system for Data Science work which is based on Ubuntu LTS with LXQt desktop.
The ADS630 is part of DFI’s new ADS series of embedded solutions built around the 12th Gen Intel Core SoC processors. This board comes in an ATX form factor supporting up to 128GB UDIMM RAM, four SATA 3.0 devices and runs on Win10 and Linux.
The ADS630 is enabled to accommodate the R680E or the Q670E chipsets from Intel. The ADS630 supports several 12Gen Intel processors which are shown in the image below for reference.
The platform has evolved steadily since its introduction in 2008 to include support for a bevy of enterprise features, including high-availability clusters and live VM migration between hosts. Proxmox also supports storage systems like local volume management, ZFS, and Ceph.
Proxmox will also run on just about any system with at least 1GB of RAM. However, users coming from VMware’s ESXi may run into platform limitations on hosts equipped with more than 12TB of memory or more than 768 CPU threads. If you fall into this category, drop me a line – I have questions. And while there isn’t a hard cap on the number of hosts per cluster, many recommend against clusters larger than 32.
Proxmox VE is available at no cost under a standard GNU license, regardless of whether it’s deployed for personal or enterprise use. For organizations that want or require a support package, Proxmox Server Solutions – the company behind the the FOSS hypervisor – offers paid licenses on a per-socket basis that unlock access to the enterprise software updates and premium support.
Mastodon, inspired by GNU social, together with Pleroma, form the most popular components of what we know as the “Fediverse” today. All of them are, in essence, federated, free software Twitter clones, interoperable with each other via the ActivityPub protocol.
In many respects, the Fediverse is a liberating force for good. Its federated design distributes governance and costs across many independent entities, something I view as a very strong design choice. Its moderation tools also do a pretty good job of keeping neo-nazis out of your feeds and providing a comfortable space to express yourself in, especially if your form of expression is maligned by society. Large groups of Fediverse members have found in it a home for self-expression which is denied to them elsewhere on the basis of their sexuality, gender expression, politics, or other characteristics. It’s also essentially entirely free from commercial propaganda.
But it’s still just a Twitter clone, and many of the social and psychological ills which come with that are present in the Fediverse. It’s a feed of other people’s random thoughts, often unfiltered, presented to you without value judgement — even when a value judgement may be wise. Features like boosting and liking posts, chasing after follower counts and mini-influencers, these rig up dopamine reinforcement like any other social network does. The increased character limit does not really help; most posts are pretty short and no one wants to read an essay aggressively word-wrapped in a narrow column.
[...]
Social networks are not good for you. The Fediverse brought out the worst in me, and it can bring out the worst in you, too. The behaviors it encourages are plainly defined as harassment, a behavior which is not unique to any ideological condition.
All code in this repository is licensed under the MIT License unless a
directory contains a LICENSE or LICENSE.md file, in which case that file
applies to the code in that sub-directory.
Clash is a free open-source terminal-based Tunnel system that supports HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS servers, written in the Go programming language.
[...]
Clash is released under the GPL-3.0 License
Data and AI company Databricks has announced several contributions to popular data and AI open source projects including Delta Lake, MLflow and Apache Spark.
The Rcpp team is please to announce the newest release 1.0.9 of Rcpp which hit CRAN late yesterday, and has been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course at r2u. The release was prepared om July 2, but it took a few days to clear a handful of spurious errors as false positives with CRAN — this can when the set of reverse dependencies is so large, and the CRAN team remains busy. This release continues with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. (This time, CRAN had asked for an interim release to silence a C++ warning; we then needed a quick follow-up to tweak tests.) As a reminder, interim ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases should generally be available in the Rcpp drat repo. These rolling release tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.
Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, around 2559 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 252 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.9% of all packages depend (directly) on CRAN, and 58.5% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 61.5 million times.
Hello! I’ve started to run a few more servers recently (nginx playground, mess with dns, dns lookup), so I’ve been thinking about monitoring.
It wasn’t initially totally obvious to me how to monitor these websites, so I wanted to quickly write up what how I did it.
I’m not going to talk about how to monitor Big Serious Mission Critical websites at all, only tiny unimportant websites.
Before we get into this kind of stream-of-consciousness outline, I’d like to note that very topically to this, over at the Spritely Institute (where I’m CTO, did I mention on here yet that I’m the CTO of a nonprofit to improve networked communication on the internet on this blog? because I don’t think I did) we published a Scheme Primer, and the feedback to it has been just lovely. This post isn’t a Spritely Institute thing (at least, not yet, though if its ideas manifested it could be possible we might use some of the tech), but since it’s about Scheme, I thought I’d mention that.
[...]
In the recent FOSS & Crafts episode What is Lisp? we talk a bit about how the assumptions that dynamically typed languages are “slow” is really due to lack of hardware support, and that lisp machines actually had hardware support directly (tagged memory architecture and hardware garbage collection) and even wrote low-level parts of their systems like the “graphics drivers” directly in lisp, and it was plenty fast, and that it would even be possible to have co-processors on which dynamic code (not just lisp) ran at “native speed” (this is what the MacIvory did), but this is all somewhat of an aside because that’s not the world we live in. So as much as I, Christine, would love to hae tagged architecture (co-)processors, they probably won’t happen, except there’s some RISC-V tagged architecture things but I don’t think they’ve gotten very far and they seem mostly motivated by a security model that doesn’t make any sense to me. But I’d love to be wrong on this! I would like tagged RISC-V to succeed! But still, there’s the problem of memory management, and I don’t think anyone’s been working on a hardware garbage collector or if that would really be a better thing anyway.
Linux fans are a little upset that Microsoft’s xCloud game streaming looks noticeable worse when running on Linux than Windows.
The Linux User-Agent has fuzzy edges and washed out colours. The dip in quality seems to go away if you enable “Clarity Boost”, an Edge-exclusive feature that provides the optimal look and feel while playing Xbox games from the cloud.
That’s great for Linux users who switched over to Microsoft Edge when it launched on Linux last November, but Linux users are more likely to use Firefox, Chrome, or other browsers which have a really bad streaming quality.
Of course, the thought is that Vole is doing this all deliberately and is reserving the best xCloud streaming performance for Windows machines in an attempt to attract more users to its own operating system. But that conspiracy goes tits up because using a Macintosh User-Agent string provides streaming performance similar to that on Windows.
Systems compromised with the OrBit malware have their LD_PRELOAD environment variable modified to facilitate shared library hijacking, the Intezer report showed.
Even if the world is fucked, it’s still beautiful, and life is still worth living.
Physical activity does indeed improve your mood, even if it’s not “working out”
Market capitalism has one job: to distribute resources and tasks. To do that, it sets prices. It is completely clueless when it comes to values (how much good something can do) and costs (how much pain something caused to create). It instead uses “prices” to approximate both of those things, and uses markets to set prices.
A friend noted that it seems like the obsolescence of some things (like how tablets and phones that stop getting security updates after only a few years) are correlated to their negative environmental impact.
Take for example a knife. If you take care of it, it can last for years. I have used the same kitchen knife daily since 1996 and I got it used then so I have no idea how old it is. It was my grandmothers. I take care of it and keep it sharp.
[...]
It’s expensive to design a tablet while making one is, uh, it would also pretty expensive if it weren’t for the huge discounts created by [unaccounted-for externalities] and [race-to-the-bottom exploitation], but because of those things, it’s pretty cheap.
Whenever we have a “expensive to make, cheap to copy” situation, market pressures are gonna work against it. One of the ways the owner class mitigates those market pressures is through pushing for artificial scarcity, through things like “patents” and “copyright”, but also through obsolescence.
working on building some clusters. hardware, xcp, talos, maybe play with openstack
ordered the required networking equipment, still need storage and a bit more compute.
will need to acquire some public ips and configure the routers then we can start publishing to the net from the cluster.
Today I took the time to re-install Linux on my laptop and try new things with partitions and the filesystem of my choice, BTRFS.
I wanted to play around with the Spartan protocol. To that end, I bodged together a simple server written in Go.
It weighs in at 114 lines. It isn’t complete, or pretty. The code is in the link below.
No doubt that there are security improvements to be made. Just tweaks the constants at the top of the file to suit your tastes. I use the FreeBSD packet filter (pf) to forward from port 300 to 3000.
I took a look at the Antenna blog aggregator antenna with a view to see wherabouts people created their blogs. My blog index is stored in /blog.gmi, for example. Another site was in /posts.gmi. Some have an index page within some directory, some forego the index page, and so on. There seemed to be as many specific solutions as there were sites. This sucks from an automated discovery viewpoint. The purpose of this post is to stimulate discussion on how we can facilitate discovery.
I personally use posts.gmi as of now, in the past I’ve used gemlog.gmi. You can’t really decide on an agreement here, as people call their blogs in many different ways: gemlogs, glogs, etc. and name the file in that respective way too.
And sure enough, you can code a basic converter in an hour or so. However HTML-to-gemtext converters that process HTML tags like this, in order, from top to bottom, produce some pretty poor results. The reasons really don’t have anything to do with the minimal capabilities of gemtext, and much more to do with modern HTML. Let’s see what the major problems are and some ideas I have to make a better converter.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Video download link | md5sum 31aa39bc7abd9051d9713302394d1a11
Geminispace Has GitHub Proxy Now
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Thanks to Gemini, you can now get stuff from GitHub without giving direct traffic to any servers of Microsoft; the address to use is gemini://auragem.space/github.
THE Gemini community is amazing. Creative coders and hackers keep crafting all sorts of useful tools. They scratch an itch and share their solution with everyone, e.g. UK weather forecasts and Wikipedia proxies (our Wiki too is in Gemini). A lot of stuff that people got accustomed to doing over the World Wide Web (with a bloated Web browser) can instead be done from the command line or a lightweight GUI, a Gemini reader/client. There’s no single Gemini reader/client; there are dozens of them! Nothing gets blocked on the basis of cookies or JavaScript support. No such thing.
“There’s no single Gemini reader/client; there are dozens of them!”The other day I showed the YouTube proxy in Gemini. Now you can browse YouTube and watch videos without a Web browser and without command line tools. It’s possible with Gemini. It’s possible owing to a proxy. Invidious aside (it’s still requiring a Web browser).
That same capsule now boasts this GitHub proxy, which allows searching, browsing and downloading projects or code (files). That’s shown in the video abobe (my very first experience with it).
As far as we’re aware, this sort of solution — a much-needed solution to a big and growing problem — is uniquely Gemini-based. “Nice to use a Gemini source,” an associate noted, and “also the SFC had a long article encouraging people to drop GitHub already. Regardless of past problems, their in-house decision to drop GitHub should be praised even if no traffic is pointed their direction.” Here’s the corresponding discussion in SoylentNews. █
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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